Best Bird of the Weekend (First of June 2010)

Summertime and the birding is easy, right? One sure way to heighten the pleasure of a special bird sighting is to share it at the virtual water cooler. Step right up and share your best bird of the weekend.

Corey had to content himself with the urban trifecta (alt: trash triumvirate) of starlings, pigeons, and Black-throated Brown Warblers, while I made do with the suburban trifecta of cardinals, Blue Jays, and… more BT Browns. This is what a weekend without a birding outing will do to you. Sigh… At least Charlie is on the move once again and has the Alpine Choughs to show for his efforts…

Alpine Choughs at the Zugspitze

What was your best bird of the weekend? Tell us in the comments section about the rarest, loveliest, or most fascinating bird you observed. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment.

Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.

Just as we had given up on seeing anything interesting at the nature center (captive bald eagles/red-tailed hawks notwithstanding), a twittering drew our attention to the treetops where the sun was just beginning to burn off the humidity. Turned out to be a whole passel of blue-gray gnatcatchers flitting from one branch to the next. Some grade-school kid in our midst also spotted what turned out to be a yellow-bellied sapsucker behind some undergrowth. (The advantages of short stature, apparently)

Great Blue Skimmer, Libellula vibrans, at Sandy Hook, NJ. Oh, wait a minute, that’s a dragonfly! It’s just so confusing with all these posts about moths and butterflies and snakes. Anyway, the skimmer was an exciting find ’cause it is seldome seen in Monmouth County. Birdwise, I had Grasshopper Sparrow earlier in the week, buzzing happily atop a leaf stalk in Franklin Township, NJ.

I went birding on Sunday to middle elevation forests near San Ramon. Little visited yet easily accessible, I hope to bird there a lot more in the future because there was a lot of habitat with good birds such as White Hawk, Black-headed Antthrush, Blue and Gold Tanager, and our best, Rufous-browed Tyrannulet.